This year was my first time participating in the Blaugust event. I accomplished my primary purpose of posting more frequently and I learned several things that will definitely help me be a better blogger.
I thought it would be interesting to also look at some more objective measures of how Blaugust impacted me. There are good and bad aspects of looking at these kinds of numbers, and I have generally found that digging too deeply can uncover dark mysteries better left unexplored.
More posts, more regularly
I posted to my two blogs a total of twenty two times (including this post) or an average of approximately five times per week. I wrote a total of just over 23,500 words during the month.
Comparing August to previous months … my past average seems to be less than one post per month. I had two posts in July, two in June, zero posts in May, April, or March, and one in February.
In the 21 years or roughly 250 months that I’ve been running Kelly’s World I’ve posted a total of 755 times… so an average during that entire time of three times per month. I don’t have a nice graph of posts over time, but I’m pretty sure that my posting frequency has decreased significantly over the past half-dozen years or so.
More visitors, more comments
My stats for Blaugust show that I had several hundred more views and visitors than the prior month, infinitely more likes, and 40 times as many comments.
Looking at the previous twelve months shows that August 2024 was about twice as busy as my blog’s most active prior month. I think it is reasonably safe to say that Blaugust brought more people to Kelly’s World, something which is very nice to see.
Blaugust… er, August
July
Last 12 months
Google search results
In simple terms, the Google search results below show how many times a page on this blog appeared in a google search result (‘Impressions’) and what ‘position’ that result was in.
Clicks and CTR (click through rate) track how often a searcher actually clicked on a link to my site in Google results. People click on links to my site very infrequently in Google results, so rarely in fact that I’ve essentially stopped caring about these numbers.
Summarizing what the charts say, Kelly’s World generated over 10,000 impressions in August versus 559 in July. Geek on a Harley barely changed, but that site still really has no audience established and has only existed for a few months.
The most odd and somewhat distressing thing in the Google data is the very low quality of search keywords relating to Kelly’s World. I have a suspicion about what is going on there, but at this point it is just a guess.
August
July
Google search key words
Google’s search results relate some very strange key words to my site. I’ve attached a snippet of this month’s examples below.
I think some of the queries pertain to DefCon and something about CrowdStrike, but I wrote nothing about that topic. Then there are the various queries about ‘Romulus’, which I think has something to do with the director of the new Alien movie being briefly banned from Reddit.
I suspect that these queries are returning my site because of a Slashdot feed in my left navigation i.e.: Google is returning the slashdot headline content as part of my site. But why is my site appearing in Google search results for simple links in my left nav instead of my site’s actual content?
My best guess is that Google is ‘ranking’ those RSS links to Slashdot content far above anything on my own site. I’ve decided to experiment by adding ‘rel=nofollow’ to those Slashdot links to see if that changes anything in the Google data, but it will probably take a while for that to filter through.
Conclusion
Blaugust was very good for my site’s numbers. This is really the ‘cherry on top’ of participating in the event, one which I’m thankful for but wasn’t actually that concerned about.
But I’m left rather confused by what Google is doing when indexing Kelly’s World. The keywords from Google that seem to link most frequently with my site appear to have more to do with my aggregated Slashdot RSS feed and the three or four links in my blogroll than with any content I write.
I have my suspicions regarding why Google is doing such a craptastic job indexing Kelly’s World. But the only reason I noticed this oddity was because I decided to review my site statistics here at the end of Blaugust. That will be another thing I can credit to the event if I eventually find the correct incantation to make Google behave rationally.
Thanks for those explanations. I used to look at my Google search stats a lot but eventually I realised I had no real idea what they meant so I rarely bother any more. That made some of it a little clearer but I still think most of the numbers Google spews out are garbage. These days, the only numbers I really look at are how many followers I have on Feedly and how many comments I get.
Blaugust is weird for me, though, It’s the one time of the year I do look at my stats, mostly because it’s when I see a lot of posts about the topic, and almost everyone reports increased traffic. My traffic generally stays almost exactly as it was. Some years it’s actually dropped during Blaugust. I think I might have gotten more comments but with only a couple of exceptions – yourself being one – they were all from the people who generally comment on my posts. I rarely get comments during Blaugust from new Blaugustians, which gives me the impression most of them aren’t visiting the blog, which would certainly tie in with the lack of incresed traffic.
I was pleased to see you mention your word count, too. The devil in me wants to suggest to Belghast that we add a new Blaugchievement next year based on exactly that. I won’t though because I think the achiever aspects of the event have already taken more prominence than is healthy. Still, I do like to see a big word count…
I really don’t understand Google’s search keyword data at all, Bhagpuss. Like why is my site showing up in results for “some def attendees forgive crowd strike some” when most of those words don’t appear in my content? If I hadn’t latched on to the idea of it being text in my left nav Slashdot feed I wouldn’t have had a clue.
The rest, like ‘impressions’, I sort of have a handle on. It is stuff that matters to google and people who pay for advertising with them. But I swear that whatever magic the Alphabet factory is weaving has made the search results themselves make less and less sense as the years have gone on.
It is interesting that you say you don’t see much of an increase in traffic that you can attribute to Blaugust. I suppose some of that could be a game of numbers: if you normally get (say) several hundred site visits a day then Blaugust traffic isn’t likely to make much of a dent.
I know for myself as a Blauginner (love that term 😉 ) I made a point of reading as much of everyone else’s posts each day. I’m retired, so with permission from my wife I was able to spend the time each morning, and I found it both enjoyable and educational. Lots of different kinds of blog formats and comment systems, completely different topics, and interesting bloggers.
If you are ever curious you can sign up for Bing’s webmaster tools and I find their page analysis gives you better insight into the effectiveness of the page.
As far as Blaugust goes for my blog. Last year was my first year and it blew up traffic in August. Not as much of an uptick this year but comments were way up. Almost every comment was from a blog I visited because of Blaugust and left a comment on their site.
Personally I find it neat that Blaugust has most of us looking at stats and things; even if just for the curiosity.
A good August.